The wags down at ThinkGeek have found themselves on the receiving end of the "best-ever cease and desist letter", after seriously treading on the National Pork Board's trotters.
ThinkGeek's canned unicorn meat ThinkGeek's offence was committed in the marketing of its quite remarkable Canned Unicorn Meat, a truly magical …

Seriously?

Not a copyright issue

This is a common place where people get confused.

In the US, parody is specifically protected under copyright law. However, trademark law is a very, very different matter. Trademark and copyright are not related to each other (trademark is actually a subset of patent law).

Here in the States, there is absolutely no protection from trademark infringement for parody. Furthermore, owners of trademark have no choice about pursuing infringement. Under US trademark law, if I own a trademark and I DON'T pursue someone who infringes it--even if the infringement is trivial or silly--I lose my trademark.

Companies don't like going after this sort of thing. It's a waste of money, time, and resources, and it subjects them to ridicule from people who don't understand trademark law. But they have to. If they don't, they lose their trademark. Stupid as it is, that's the way the law is written.

That may be... but...

A 12 page C&D for something like this is obviously not necessary. You can scope it down to a page and still be "protecting" your trademark, and without the death of a couple of trees in the process as they 1) faxed it and 2) printed it out and sent it certified mail.

Only in...

in a culture of litigation...

I'm amazed the confederated chicken and turkey producers association haven't sued: Pork is white meat, in the same way Bill Bailey is a vegetarian.

"I'm a vegetarian. I'm not strict; I eat fish, and duck. Well, they're nearly fish, aren't they? They're semi-submerged a lot of the time, they spend a lot of time in the water, they're virtually fish, really. And pigs, cows, sheep, anything that lives near water, I'm not strict."

So Bacon is ironic white meat and Chops are post modern drumsticks.

Why are the pork board trying to sell their product as something that it isn't, rather than focusing on it's strengths?

Pigs: they're porkilicious!

Job done. Yet, no doubt some marketeer got paid a bundle to lie to the public (which is what they're expert at; whilst not ripping off each other's ideas). Mafia polar bear pushing birdseye... not in any way related to the Mafia panda recommending fox's biscuits? Although in the later case an actual fox would be more imposing: "buy these biscuits or your kids might have a nasty accident; capische?

White Meat

A few years back, when the movie March of the Penguins movie came out, I did some t-shirts for Cafe-Press that said "Penguins, the other white meat" it took them (Pork Council) about 72 hours to contact me with a cease and desist...or else.

I guess if you get "The other white meat" tattooed on your butt, they would literally own your ass.

National pork barrel

They are also going after a breastfeeding blog for very similar reasons so they have form on this sort of foolishness they were issuing the slogan "The other White Milk" as this is the colour of most milk except kangaroos that is pink apparently